


Think Like A . . .

by tooth_and_claw



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen, implied Parker/Hardison/Eliot, light Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:59:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2846921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tooth_and_claw/pseuds/tooth_and_claw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nate tries to teach Parker a little bit about Masterminding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Think Like A . . .

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melpomenethemis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melpomenethemis/gifts).



Money. Money smell. Money texture. The sight of that fine green ink, old men so sexy they made Hardison jealous. Parker spent a lot of time at his place these days, but she kept her hideout for two reasons. The first was silence, valuable in its own right. The second, the best: money. Her hideout had a room. Parker took naps there. On a bed of, you guessed it.

We all have our indulgences.

After a night of surveillance and a morning of chasing, running, punching, dodging and crying (she kinda liked it when they cried) a nap sounded divine. Parker tossed open the curtain to her ‘bedroom’, face tilted upward to catch the welcoming aroma of paper and ink.

The rage scream could be heard in all adjacent buildings. Police were even called, though they found nothing, and left baffled. 

****  
“Where is it?” Parker slammed the balcony doors open, shattering several panes of glass. Nate winced. That was definitely going to be on his room bill. 

“Good morning, Parker,” He rubbed one of his temples, massaging a throbbing vein. “I see you got my invitation. Come in, come in.”

“I’m already in. Nate, how could you?” She titled her head, voice strangled. Nate sat down on the edge of he and Sophie’s rumpled bed and smoothed the sheets. 

“You asked for advice, right?”

“Stealing my money is not advice! That is the opposite of advice! That is, is . . .” Parker waved her hands. “I don’t know, advice in the negative!”

“Au contraire,” Nate grabbed a bottle of Perrier Sophie had ordered last night, a last ditch effort to keep him away from the champagne, and poured a brimming glass. At least he wasn’t hair-of-the-dogging his hangovers anymore. “You asked me to help you get a handle on this whole Mastermind role. Which I agreed to do. So. Lesson one.” He capped the bottle. “You are in charge of the well being of the most precious thing in the world. The thing you love the most, and to mess up means losing it all. Couldn’t impress the importance of that on you with just *words*.”

Parker’s hands uncurled, and though Nate could see the nail marks she’d left in the palms, her posture relaxed into wary caution. A definite improvement from immediate attack. “Money isn’t the most precious thing in the world to me.” She paused. “Anymore.”

“Oh I know, I know, but Hardison and Eliot wouldn’t agree to let themselves be kidnapped, so I, uh, I had to make do.” 

Parker fussed with her shirt sleeves, then sighed, kicking at the glass on the floor. “Sorry about your doors. Mostly sorry. I’m still mad.”

“That’s good. Anger’s good, Parker, don’t let anyone tell you different. It’s just making sure you don’t get eaten up with it that’s the rub. And,” he jabbed the nearby TV remote at the silent screen, waving it into life. “You need to know how to direct it.”

On the screen was a live recording of somewhere dark and cloistered, lit only by a single bare bulb. In the glow, her money seemed pale and wan, even piled as high and as neat as it was. A man could be crushed to death in those stacks. Her eyes narrowed. “Like at you?”

“Sure. But mostly at the problem. And the problem here is . . . “

“You.” He raised a brow, she sighed dramatically. “How to get back my money.”

“Right. Do you want something to drink?”

“No,” she was staring at the screen, brow furrowed. “It’s a Seminole 872 camera surveillance system. My money is somewhere dark, sure, but it isn’t underground, there’s not enough moisture. But . . . I don’t see anything else. There aren’t any more clues. ”

“Not if you’re just thinking from a Thief’s perspective, no. You got the camera system down just from the lens, though. I’m impressed with that.”

Parker clicked her tongue against her teeth, grasping his meaning. “A mastermind can’t just think like a mastermind. Or a Thief mastermind can’t just think like a thief, whatever”

Pleased that she got it so quickly, Nate stood and carefully, very carefully, picked his way around the broken glass to get himself to the balcony. Fresh sea air ruffled his hair and collar, the sounds of traffic that came with it a mechanical hum too distant to be disturbing. The ocean twinkled under morning sunlight that warmed his nose and made his headache seem less painful than it had been. 

Parker shuffled behind him. She was pacing, probably staring at the screen. “A mastermind has to think like everyone else on their team.”

“So when you’re looking through a camera—“

“And you can’t see anything but the boring old room in front of you—definitely not a vault—a Thief would make plans based on what she could see. But the Grifter wouldn’t, and the Hitter wouldn’t, and the Hacker . . .” 

Nate smiled.

“The hacker would get into the camera system itself. But I’m not a Hacker, Nate.”

“Thinking like one is all that’s required. Hardison helped me set it up,” Nate waved his glass in the direction of the laptop waiting on the room’s small desk. Whatever hackles actually were, she was raising them. “Oh, He had no idea what for, relax.”  
Parker snorted and stomped, but she went to the computer all the same and pulled up the program Nate had been using. She clicked around, figuring a few things out. Nate watched the screen, and after a minute or two the camera shuddered and began to swing around, tracking back and forth. Parker jumped in triumph. “Yes!”

The money slowly eclipsed from view, and a dark wall inched past until the edge of a frosted glass doorway slid into their sights.  
Beyond the door, the firm backs of two very large men standing as still as a human could. 

She panned the camera in as wide an arc as it would go, turning it to look at both the ceiling and the floor, or as much of it could be sighted. “Damn.” She muttered, resting the lens on a small vent. “That’s way too small to get through. Walls are thick, too, can’t really cut through them. Maybe I could—no—“

“You’re thinking—“

“Like a Thief,” Parker answered. “Right. Okay. So a Hacker, he would . . . that door is manual. I could pick the lock while the goons are distracted . . .”

“How easy do you think it is to distract these guys?”

“Let’s find out.” Parker tapped a couple of keys and a grid appeared on the screen. “I picked up a few tricks,” she said, smug in response to his surprise. Okay, a few tricks. One of those tricks was to select a point on that grid and suddenly the view changed, the screen blinking from the dim white light coming through the doors to the florescent bright of the hallway outside. They got a sharp look at the guards—well, Nate had seen them both already, but Parker got her first glance. They wore blue uniforms of nondescript design and had no identifying tags. One was black, with a bald pate and a small diamond in the left ear. The other was white, taller, longer hair. Two of Eliot’s friends, but she didn’t know that. 

The men didn’t blink as the camera began to pan back and forth, glancing up and down the hall. It was some office building, utterly unidentifiable in alliance just like the guards. People in business casual attire walked by, carrying briefcases, purses, papers, coffee. Parker clucked her tongue. “They look tough.”

Nate needed an aspirin. “Mm-hmm.”

“I could . . . I could get a dress, come by, spill my coffee . . .” She was uncertain because she knew how unlikely that plan was to work. Several lovely women (and men, never forget the men or risk overlooking a key) walked by and the two guards didn’t flinch, didn’t track them with their eyes or chuckle. They were still, professional. “Most guards get bored pretty easily. Not like in the movies. They look at their phones or talk or want cigarette breaks. I don’t think these guys know what a Candy Crush *is*, let alone how to play it. Okay. So I could grift them maybe, but without more info . . .”

“Without more info, what do you have to do?”

“Think like a Hitter.” 

Like a Hitter. So what would a Hitter do against these two? “Imagine him, Parker. Yourself if you need to, but imagine Eliot doing the hurt on these guys.”

“I can see it,” she said, unflinching. “Don’t worry, I got it.” That coolness. If anyone had asked Nate a few years ago to describe the kind of violence she must be imagining, or if anyone asked Hardison or Sophie now, that anyone would be sorely disappointed. Nate didn’t like blood. He preferred every other way, and in his heart of hearts, he knew Parker did as well, but that didn’t mean that, in *her* heart of hearts, she wasn’t capable of it in a way Nate wasn’t. She could be the Hitter, oh yes. She could kill if need be. 

Didn’t need to here, though. “For us, and for the best of the brawlers, the battle doesn’t take place in the punching. It all happens before, you know, before the first blow.”

“Think it out. Go by instinct in the actual fight, yeah. Note their weak points heading in and what they’re likely to do.”

“So give it to me. What are they likely to do?”

“ . . . go for their tasers.” She said. Nate raised his brows, glanced at the screen and then back to her. He hadn’t noticed the tasers tucked into their pants, less obvious than a gun, a sleek model built for stealth. “Weaknesses. One has that earring, I can see—“

Eliot approaching, the guards going for their weapons, no warnings exchanged because the three of them knew each other’s measure, Eliot’s right hand feinting as if headed for a gun, left coming around and pummeling the shorter one in the ear, driving the spiky point of his earring into the soft point where his skull and his neck met, where the Eustachian tubes sat close to the skin, then grab the diamond and rip, tear it right out, and when the guard lifts his hands to his ear, an uppercut and he is out. Tall one now has the taser out, pointing it, doesn’t get a chance to fire as he and Eliot dance, each trying to break the other’s knee, feet locked together in an intimate, violent waltz. A ruse. Eliot grabs the man by that longish hair and pulls, hard and sharp, a couple of bloody chunks coming away in his fist and them boom, boom to the solar plexus. Tall one can’t breathe, passes out, “Fight over.” Parker finishes. 

Brutal and quick, just like Eliot would have wanted. Nate’s plans always drug those fights out longer. He’d learned to compensate by shaving off 20 seconds from his plans. He exhaled, breath whistling through his teeth. “ . . . fight over, okay. Yeah.”

On the screen, the guards were still standing, but were now irrelevant. “That leaves the Grifter,” Parker announced cheerfully. She was clearly having fun at this point, possibly even perked up by the imagined brawl. Disturbing things, Parker, went along like bread and butter.

“Did I hear something about grifting?” Sophie entered the room and, as usual, the air disappeared from Nate’s lungs. She was dressed in a soft robe the same color of the towel she had wrapped around her hair, creamy white like a cloud just after sunrise. The skin on her legs and breastbone glistened with water droplets, inviting as a dewshined rose petal. He could go on with a thousand clichés and none of them would come close to this, this vision, his vision, his fiancé and light of his life. 

“Hi Sophie!”

“Hello, Parker. Nate didn’t mention you’d be joining us for breakfast.” She paused. “What happened to the doors?”

“I did!”

“Parker did.”

“Of course she did. Well. Good morning. Shall I call room service to sweep that up?”

“Not yet. I’m masterminding,” Parker said, folding her hands over each other and resting her sharp chin on the arch formed between them. 

“Is that so,” Sophie leaned over Parker’s shoulder, and, she did this deliberately, Nate was sure, her robe fell open just enough to let her breast shift into view. Good god woman. “What’s the target?”

“She’s supposed to be doing this on her own, you know.” Nate offered uselessly.

“I think I can . . . yes! Okay, here’s the camera in the lobby. And, oh look, there’s the other guards. That’s more like it.”

Sophie sighed and smiled. “Oh, those poor fools.”

”That one’s playing Candy Crush.”

“That one can’t keep his eyes to himself.”

“All it would take is a little dress . . .”

“Some spilled coffee . . .”

Nate really, *really* needed some aspirin. “Okay, okay. The Grifting you have down. But how—“ He raised a finger. “Would you get the money out?”

“Oh, that? That’s easy.” Parker grinned and tapped her temple. “You just gotta think like a thief.”

Sophie giggled and tossed a bottle a Nate. He almost didn’t catch it. It rattled in his hand, and he guessed there were maybe six, seven pills left in the container. More than enough for today. Thank god, and thank Sophie too. “Well. Looks like the lesson is over. Oh! Except for one, minor, very minor detail.” The girls waited, indulging his dramatic flair. Saints, the both of them. They knew what he was going to say. “Your money is, ah, still missing.”

Parker smiled, slow and sweet. “Then let’s go get it.”


End file.
